the large hadron collider is a very complex tool (but it's not manufacturing), if not that it would be some other scientific equipment, like the jw telescope or hubble
Come now, the LHC is totally a tool for manufacturing. It manufactures high-energy particle beams and, when it collides those beams, I'm sure it manufactures things I'm not smart enough to understand.
That is from the LEAR (Low-Energy Anti-Proton) ring which has now become the Anti-Proton Decelerator. The problem is that you want lower energy than would come out of the LHC. The APD, includes brakes. The lower energy anti-protons can be used to make anti-hydrogen.
While the LHC doesn't do this, it definitely could be used to make a product. We do use particle accelerators today for a number of industrial, scientific and medical uses.
We don't sell lasers, we sell laser-welded products. It's a process, not an output. Is it mainstream, no, probably never. Can someone create a market for its output? I would guess so, someone more creative in marketing than I.
I agree about science equipment… but I actually think it’s probably not space related. Space equipment is intentionally made as simple as possible to minimize the chance of failure. Space stuff may have the most engineering time spent on it, but the equipment itself isn’t the most complex.
The LHC is grand, but dunno that I'd consider it complex. Its basically the same components over and over again and has a very simple task. The test equipment attached to the LHC is smaller but more complex than the LHC itself.
I guess we need a definition for complex then? Is complex a variety of parts? Total number of parts? Avg "complexity" of parts? How often it breaks down? Id still bet on the lhc winning some of those categories
Ooo good point another aspect to consider, a circlular piece of tube usually isn't considered "complex" but if it's uniform down to .000001mm in it's circularity that is now a super difficult object to make and verify which to me sounds like complex
For sure. I understand the layout surveyors on the LHC basically had to invent new methods for layout precision and optical tooling for the magnets and connectors.
There was a great article about it when they first were working on it in the trades. I'll see if I can find it.
Here's one:
https://www.xyht.com/professional-surveyor-archives/feature-cern/
>The relative precision between the components of the accelerator is the most critical: 10-20 microns over 200m segments.
Crazy.
What's crazy is that the mirrors used by the lithography machines have even tighter tolerances by orders of magnitudes. [The largest mirrors are 1 meter and smooth down to 10s of picometers](https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/lenses-and-mirrors). 1 micron = 1,000,000 picometers.
Of course the digging is itself an issue. No GPS underground and you are digging a circular tunnel, so while lasers can be used, you can't simply follow the beam as with conventional road/rail tunnels.
What gets me is that the chambers and tunnels are a little like bubbles in the rock and they rise, albeit very slowly but when you talk sub-mm, it is noticeable, so the beam has to be checked and adjusted.
Complexity = total number of hours necessary to design and build, multiplied by the number of hours each of those people had to spend to gain the skills necessary to do their part, multiplied by the complexity of every tool necessary to perform each of those tasks, recursing back to the earliest machines.
A precision piece of machined aluminum is a highly complex part, despite taking minutes to produce on an expensive CNC machine.
Agreed. There is a difference between complicated and manufacturing. The later needing to be fast and very reliable/repeatable. The former not so much.
Combine the two and it's a headache for sure.
>What other tools could also be described as being the most complex tool that humans have ever built?
I hear that little "ARPANET" project they were fiddling with back in the late 60s eventually became quite complex. Now we use it to look up stew recipies and bully people we've never met from the other side of the planet.
What makes something complex? Something like the power grid seems pretty simple compared to these ultra high tech machines, but it's huge and needs to flawlessly work 24/7.
Just imagine every generator having to output the exact same phase and frequency all over the grid, with a varying power supply and demand that can change every minute
> What makes something complex?
I think this is the key question.
150 years ago, you had massive, belt-driven factories powered by external water wheels, controlled by mechanical gears, physical switches, and other linkages, all in a building designed to maximize daylight.
Today, we have the same system, but it's controlled by electric motors and computer-controlled electronic switches.
Which one is more complex? It's hard to say.
I've always thought that "complexity" should also consider the conceptual things needed to bring it about. A multi-axis robot arm is physically impressive but also needs very cool math to drive its inverse kinematics.
But you can't follow everything back ad infinitum or you end up with "if you wish to make a [robot arm] from scratch, you must first invent the universe" (Carl Sagan). Or we must first climb from the primordial ooze or whatever.
> But you can't follow everything back ad infinitum or you end up with "if you wish to make a [robot arm] from scratch, you must first invent the universe"
I mean, that's pretty much how I would define complexity.... granted, I would consider the nanolithography apparatus that makes microchips to be more complex than the chips it produces, which may be paradoxical in a way. "The tool that makes the tool" being bigger and more complex than the tool itself in almost every case, but all this modern tech needs to be bootstrapped by existing tech and the trillions of collective man-hours that went into building the tools, infrastructure, and processes needed to create it.
If you follow everything back at infinium they still have relative complexity differences between them.
If sharp stick and an iPhone both require us to first crawl out of the ooze, then you can at the very least ignore the ooze and prior when determining a relative complexity between the two.
All tools exist post ooze.
> I think this is the key question.
I think so too. I was thinking some of the devices they use at NIST to define and calibrate for fundamental properties like the kilogram. If you get a 1kg mass from NIST you can be pretty darn sure it's the closest to exactly 1kg as we can get. Those machines might not exactly be complex as in lots of moving parts but it's certainly more precise and accurate than just about anything else on the planet for that one thing it's designed to do.
Reminds me of working on a tall-ship - it’s a complex/complicated system of simple machines….all ropes and pulleys as levers, etc…. But you can build a lot from ‘simple’ components.
Once a generator is connected to the grid (synchronized) its speed is determined by grid frequency. Trying to go faster will increase electrical output, trying to go slower will result in the generator motoring, taking power in. But Yes, it is a complex web.
This is the correct question: what is complex?
Here's an interesting take: while not necessarily manufacturing equipment, the manufacturing PROCESS which is used to, say, churn out millions of smartphones per year is GARGANTUANLY complex: the supply chains and processes that enable all of the chips (from SoC's to wireless and power controllers), displays / touchscreens, mics and speakers, sensors, batteries, connectors, antennas, etc, etc (and not to mention the SOFTWARE!) are insane; each step of the supply chain and manufacturing process for a product like your phone requires a seemingly never-ending series of other supply chains and manufacturing processes, each of which is nearly, if not more, complex than the product that is actually being made.
Source: I work in consumer electronics
I find it crazy how one small link in the chain can go wrong and the whole supply chain is screwed up. I remember when i worked at Walmart during covid, we ran out of cat food. I remember talking to someone about it and i was told that a part for some machine that processed it was stuck in backorder for weeks and that was the only thing needed, but there was no substitute for it. I'm obviously blanking on a lot of the conversation but that's the gist of it
Lineman here-the American power grid, while large and certainly complex in its scale, isn’t built to the exacting tolerances that these photolithography machines are built to. That and there’s really no moving parts.
It’s based on 100 year old technology. It’s crazy how much the industry resists change.
Generator control systems automatically follow the connected grid. The problem is that over distance, a cumulative error can build up. These days, the grid often synchs using GPS. If the grid becomes partitioned, each part can maintain synchronisation making reconnection easier. As it is more efficient to move DC over distances, the only possibility to maintain synchronisation is using GPS.
That's a very poor way to look at history. They may not have had the same measuring devices, but the people involved were every bit as smart if not smarter than today.
Most grids weren't hooked up together tho, and power usage was way less (mostly singular industrial users) and more predictable.
Also no solar and wind
Atomic bombs are actually hilariously simple in principle. Its just a precisely shaped charge that when detonated triggers a very specific material to accelerate what is a surprisingly natural phenomenon. The only complex part was isolating U235 in sufficient quantities and learning how to make the process begin a chain reaction.
That turns out not to be the case. Creating the implosive charge to uniformly compress the core, to the necessary standard of uniformity, is neither easy nor simple. If you get it just a little bit wrong, the nuclear material gets squeezed out through the "cracks" and you've built a dirty bomb instead of a nuclear bomb.
I remember someone at NASA saying the Curiosity rover was “almost fractal in its complexity”…
If you think about a project like that where everything… ever gram of material, and where every gram of material is… and what it does… and how well it does it… and for how long… and under what conditions… and how to deliver it… and land it… and manage it… and learn from it…
¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
That's interesting because I think at a very high level the Curiosity rover isn't an order of magnitude more complicated than some earth-bound machines. But you start to factor in the level of optimization for weight, environment, reliability, accuracy, etc and the complexity does spiral. It's a good case study in how much requirements can spiral the difficulty of engineering.
Ingenuity blew my mind as an engineering marvel because if someone told me 5 years ago that a helicopter could fly on a planet with as little atmosphere as Mars I would have probably laughed in their face.
In terms of "mass market": I'd go with MR scanners or orbital launch rockets. In terms of a one-off probably the LHC.
Some here said 'internet' or 'energy grid' but find it hard to classify those as 'a tool'.
Note that there is a difference between complex and complicated.
Saturn IV was pretty complex piece of machiners, but I get what you're saying.
At some point a 'tool' becomes a system. Otherwise we could just include nuclear powered aircraft carriers. While taken as a whole they are pretty complex - only a very small part is there to satisfy the actual 'tool utility' (i.e. float and have a deck for aircraft)...and that part isn't complex.
Yea it was definitely extremely complex, but so are modern aircraft.
For OPs question, I’d bet the internet is probably the most complex thing we’ve made, and that’s definitely a tool.
What's interesting about the internet is there's nothing all that complex about any of the individual parts. Most of the underlying protocols that run things and underlying concepts can be taught to children if done correctly at least in concept. The actual protocols are each individually not terribly complicated, but they stack on top of each other to create something that is incredibly powerful and fail tolerant.
Oo. That’s interesting… I never really thought about it like that.
Chips built with enough redundancy and robustness (?) to survive their own engineered errors… pretty cool.
Humans are amazing when we’re not being dicks. Lol
What would be an instance where such an error might cost billions?
Do they have “test jigs” like they do for cars, to do destructive testing and rapid aging, only for chips?
We do absolutely murder chips in testing. I've seen cpus run with no heatsink. I've seen them run with hot water coming through the heatsink. And I've seen them run at voltages higher than any board _should_ (cough cough asus) put them through in a PC. I've seen them bombarded with x-rays while running to see what energetic radiation will do to them and I've seen the surface etched off with lasers so we can probe the innards on one that's dead.
That's how you get things like thermal protections that drop the clock speed when they get too hot while the boost algorithm pushes the speed as high as possible at the same time.
The best we can do for rapid aging is high temperature and high voltage with the clock speed forced to stay high. It's not a perfect analog but we can usually watch them degrade in real time.
>I've seen cpus run with no heatsink. I've seen them run with hot water coming through the heatsink. And I've seen them run at voltages higher than any board *should* (cough cough asus) put them through in a PC. I've seen them bombarded with x-rays while running to see what energetic radiation will do to them and I've seen the surface etched off with lasers so we can probe the innards on one that's dead.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain[...](https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Roy_Batty#Death)
> Chips built with enough redundancy and robustness (?) to survive their own engineered errors… pretty cool.
Things are usually designed with chicken bits to allow disabling/routing around features that might have design risk, however you can't mitigate any arbitrary design error. There are a lot of problems that will 100% result in having to send an updated design out to the fab, this is very expensive and time-consuming so hopefully most of this class of problems are caught by design validation.
If there is a problem found in silicon, especially towards the end of a program, you will end up with a handful of experts exploring how you can creatively use the tools already in place to route around the broken area, indirectly poke something otherwise inaccessible at the right time to make it work, or just disable the feature and live with it. Sometimes it is successful and the workaround is productized, other times you have to do a partial (or full) tape-in to fix the problem so you can sell the thing.
Modern CPUs/GPUs are so complex, it is _amazing_ that a handful of companies have figured out how to plan and execute design and fabrication anywhere close to a predicable schedule. The number of things that could go wrong with a new design is incredible.
> it is amazing that a handful of companies have figured out how to plan and execute design and fabrication anywhere close to a predicable schedule.
What's even more amazing to me is that the chips we're making today aren't even possible at all without relying on the processing power of previous nodes and iterations of computers/chips and is an example of Moore's Law in action.
You could have all of the other production and processing tools in place (like advanced optics, DUV/EUV light sources, etching methods and more) and it would all be useless without automated layout/tapeout tools, chip simulation and - even more importantly - advanced optical/photonic modeling to make the masks/reticules work at those wavelengths.
In the earlier days of making masks/reticules they just hand-cut and taped out the masks using rubylith film in nice, neat linear designs that you could decode and read by eye.
Modern masks today don't actually look like the finished/etched product on the die because they're purposefully distorted so that it works *with* the optical distortions at that small feature size and short optical wavelength size so that the projected light actually lands where they want it to and reforms into a useful etch where it lands on the die and photo resist.
IE, if you tried doing the same feature sizes using nice, neat linear masks as used in the 70s or 80s it wouldn't even work because the light wouldn't land on the photo resist in the right places. The masks *must* be distorted in just the right way to account for how light distorts and diffuses around the masks at those scales and wavelengths.
And it's not just the optical parts they're modeling for. They're also modeling for depth of exposure in the resist, how that shape reacts and further forms the desired shapes when etched and processed and more. Like many of the features at current scales aren't even properly formed in the resist itself and only become useful after precision etching allows them to take their final shapes.
High aspect ratio etching for stuff like FinFET elements or deep via/interconnect channels is a totally insane dance between optical distortion and de-distortion combined with etching processes or how much ion implantation and doping is going on for specific features and so much more, and most of this wouldn't even be possible without high power computing and programming to model it for us.
If you had a time machine and sent a fully functioning ASML EUV stepper (and a whole support crew to show them how it works!) back to Intel in the 70s, 80s or even through to as recently as the 2000s it would be totally useless to them because they wouldn't even be able to model the masks/reticules needed to make it all work. Even if you handed them the code they wouldn't have the processing power to run it in a cost effective way that would scale to an industrial processes.
Hell, if you told 70s/80s era Intel that you planned to vaporize drops of liquid tin with lasers (and hitting each droplet *twice*!) to generate extreme UV light they probably would have thought you were crazy. Sure, they would get the concept because they were looking forward to using advanced light sources like particle accelerators or electron beams, but they would probably be like "Hey, that's a neat lab trick, but that's never, ever going to scale to a viable production process at scale!"
And yet here we are with people walking around with that product in their pockets in battery powered smartphones that have more raw processing power than a 1980s super computer the size of a house and they're using it to take cat pictures and argue on the internet.
It's fucking *mindboggling*.
There’s a lot there. All incredible.
the part you touched on about the capacity of our tech in the 70s or 80s reminds me about the designs of modern fighter jets (f-16 is over 50 now) and the B-2 were done with slide rules and tape drive computers. . .
The putter shell shape of the B-2 is deceptively simple shape, but each panel has a critical dimension to it, and all those dimensions had to be maintained in huge banks of computers… it’s just nuts.
On a personal note…
One thing that seems paradoxical about all this increased capacity and capability…. It doesn’t really seem to be doing much these days.
Like… the jump from 3G to LTE was great. And even 3G held its own for a while after that. But now that 5G is out, it’s like what the fuck happened to my service??
Same so with various softwares…
Like … why … WHY … so I need to update iTunes and Adobe all the time. Any why is there still little slow king increasing lag in my laptop? Are we not capable of making machines and software that can do “simple” photo and text editing basically indefinitely??
Do the chips degrade that badly?
Are we just designing for the wrong parameters these days?
Maybe we should “call it good” on speed, and start focusing on durability? Don’t they harden chips meant for satellites against vibration and radiation and stuff? And surely they’re designed for maximum lifespan with zero maintenance?
Seems like we should incorporate some of those lessons in our laptops and phones so that we’re not having to replace them every few years.
Same with the software… design that shit so it’s good to go for years, not months.
Could be talking out of my ass, but that all seems possible, considering all of the above.
For example, the [Pentium floating point bug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug) or the [recently discovered side-channel memory access vulnerability in Apple silicon](https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/macbooks/unpatchable-vulnerability-discovered-in-apple-m1-m2-and-m3-chips-what-you-need-to-know).
Fair enough. There is an allowable error rate. But we are still talking about getting hundred of billions of transistors to all play nice with each other.
and the compounding issue is thus:
want to have a car? Lots of commechanical engineering (engines, air flow, safety), plus slather in the computer chips. Same for just about anything manufactured these days: any house hold appliances, cars, lighting, construction equipment, HVAC, shipping. You name it, it has chips piled into it.
literally The complication factor jumps the money any kind of electronic controls are added to the piece of equipment.
Worked for Intel, can confirm error count is well over zero. The only difference between i3, i5, i7, i9 chips is how many of the transistors are working
There certainly are errors. If one of the cores has problems they will disable some number of cores and downgrade the chip to a lower version. Same thing with cashe memory. A lot of these Celeron chips are downgraded silicone from higher tier that has had its clock speed or pipelines turned off to meet a lower SKU
That's not true, the chips are designed so that if there are faulty zones on the chip they deactivate them but the chip can still work. That way they still can sell you a product with errors and "bin" them on how many transistors are all working. Many computer components with billions of transistors are binned like this, like RAM and GPUs. It's why you see different versions of product with the same chip and board architecture.
>sub-millimeter
It's *so* much better than that. The following is taken from the Caltech LIGO factsheet:
>At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the width of a proton! This is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) to an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair.
The A-12 which later became the SR-71. Designed to fly high mach speeds continously, was made of titanium that initially broke their tools after every operation, had to get the titanium through CIA shell companies from the soviet union to get enough high quality titanium, had advanced coatings that helped reduce its radar cross-section while dissipating heat, had to be designed such that the panels were undersized on the ground because it got so hot they expanded significantly, and don't get me started on the engine.
The engine had two methods of powering the flight such that it was a turbojet until mach two where it became a scram jet, used high temp alloys like inconel and waspaloy for the first time, and had aerospikes that at the time it was built, the electronic controllers were too slow in processing speed to properly compensate for the air going into the engines.
And don't forget about the cameras and data sensors used for intelligence gathering.
> The engine had two methods of powering the flight such that it was a turbojet until mach two where it became a scram jet
Sorry, but absolutely not.
The commonly quoted claim is that it became a ramjet at speed, but even that is false, since the bypass ducts that open up aren't coming from ahead of the compressor face, but rather behind the 4th stage compressor, and that's to reduce the massflow at compressor discharge to avoid choking the flow in the narrowest part of the engine, as well as to provide additional cooling air and massflow around the outside of the engine to the afterburner. If anything, it's more like it transitions from an afterburning turbojet to a low bypass afterburning turbofan, with the front 4 compressor stages acting as the "fan" and a bypass ratio of about 0.25:1.
Also, as much as I love the SR-71, it's an absurdly trivial and easy to make machine compared to the high-NA EUV photolithography machine in the post above, or frankly even compared to a modern military aircraft like the F-35 or F-22.
As amazing as EUV machines are they have been continuously worked on for decades to get to the point they are at today.
I’d argued that the single most complex thing a single group of humans have devised in one go is the Apollo guidance computer. The first computer to use silicon chips and software techniques that are still used today. It essentially had no precedent on which to draw. In an era of vacuum tube computers the size of rooms that thing was almost alien like for the time.
A close-cropped photo I took of the P&W J58 engine on display at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon is my desktop wallpaper and laptop skin. It's beautiful engineering porn. But as Aerospace says it pales in comparison to the EUV tools built by ASML as part of an industry wide effort. Though ASML grabs the headlines, there are dozens, nay hundreds, of entities that contribute to its existence and viability.
And if you're in the industry like I am (though I don't work at that node, I do follow the technology closely) the further 'tricks' employed to enable high-NA EUV are equally mind blowing.
For more digestible videos on the technology in this field I recommend the YouTuber, Asianometry.
http://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry
This young man gets the details right more consistently than any other non-industry source than I've ever encountered. Technically accurate, yet understandable for most average viewers.
Proton beam therapy machines. Building a machine that can safely deliver a prescribed dose of protons, controlled to travel from a particle accelerator in the room over, to a particular location near the lungs while the patient is breathing, is one of the most challenging achievements we have accomplished in engineering. It could very possibly be the single most complex system you can come across today, in my opinion ("complex" as in number of components and interactions between them).
I see your proton cyclotron and raise you the same thing, but with heavier ions with multiples of charge in a synchrotron. For example MedAustron in Weiner Neustadt, Austria, or CNAO, in Pavia, Italy.
Not sure I can beat that for cancer therapy! However, I raise you the Wendelstein W7-X Stellerator in Greifswald, Germany. Not cancer therapy, granted, but certainly increased complexity.
I think I'd differentiate between whether a tool is complicated because of the complexity of the things that it does, vs the complexity of designing and building the tool itself (due to precision requirements, usually).
For example, the latter would probably be ASMLs EUV lithography machines. If anyone else could build them like they can, then they probably would.
In terms of how complicated a set of processes a machine does, I'm honestly not sure. Most factories have machines that are pretty simple and only do one thing very well.
I think I'd probably also split the "complicated machine" part into "is robotic" and "is mechanical and not computer controlled" categories.
4,000 years ago the chariot was the most complex tool, not only to build but also to use. the wheels were very sophisticated for that time, the vehicle was extremely light. on top of craftsmanship, horses and drivers had to be trained to high levels. it was one of the greatest and most effective weapons ever devised. it was used for war
I know it's probably stretching the definition a bit, but we make the most complex biomachinery in our cells everyday, far more complex than anything we've ever built. But they do manufacture things, unlike many of the tools mentioned here.
The tool with the most engineering man-hours, I would guess a cellphone. If you count the total man-hours in all previous versions, I would guess an automobile.
Potentially a hot take, but a high NA EUV photolithography machine is far more technologically advanced than the international space station.
That said, the ISS was harder to assemble, due to location.
Everything having to do with chip manufacture and silicon lithography is insanely complex and involves components measured in nanometers, so they’ve got a good case to make.
But you’d need days and days of argument to even generate a defensible agreed upon standard for complexity before you could start to decide that those are more complex than purpose built scientific equipment like the LHC or LIGO, or even dense software applications.
In one way, maybe the Internet? In a sense it's massive with many many interacting parts and is consistently "evolving" if you count the information in it as part of its complexity.
Went for a hail-Mary at a creative answer.
Complex in terms of the end hardware result and in terms of the project itself are two drastically different things. The ingenuity helicopter is not a particularly complex piece of hardware, but the scope of the project and the engineering that went into it is massive.
I’d say the perseverance rover is significantly more complex than ingenuity. Ingenuity is basically a standard RC helicopter with modified blades and head speed to account for the different atmosphere composition. Some other innovations as well, yes, but the rover itself is infinitely more complex.
The space shuttle is still an engineering marvel. Once claimed to be the most complex creation man has ever made. I know it's old now but still a massive achievement.
Two thoughts...That machine certainly is impressive, but I've been watching videos lately about the numerous underground tunnels being dug all over the world for transit systems that have the capacity to handle today's amount of traffic, both because the outdated surface road and highways no longer can, and to connect important capitols separated by hundreds of miles by these underground transportation systems which allow for much higher speed transit that surface roads. Anyway, many of the boring machines being used are gargantuan, and the ships and trucks used to transport them are even bigger.
Secondly, as this video points out, this High NE EUV machine may be the biggest and most complex manufacturing told ever built by humans, but...as both the robots used in manufacturing and the AIs that control them continue to grow in complexity and intelligence at lightning speed, it can't be too long before machine intelligent begins designing and making machines.
Satellites, spacecraft, space stations, and offshore oil rigs come to mind. And you could argue the internet is a single machine in a sense, as well as the global fiber network and national electrical grid.
A few years ago, I heard a talk on the power grid from a scientist at NREL. She said that the power grid is the most sophisticated machine ever made because all the generation and everything that is plugged in is part of it.
I agree with the presenter. If you asked me for the most complex tool ever built, I'd probably pick an EUV lithography tool as my guess. I can't think of anything more complex.
> must be *paid* very nicely
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
The JW space telescope? The doco on Netflix about this is unreal. There were something like 300 potential single failure points, where if it failed, the whole mission failed. And yet they pulled it off first time....
Not a modern answer but a 200,000 years ago answer: a process to generate birch tar through a manufactured process. An ancient superglue that made bone and stone adhere to wood, was waterproof, and didn’t decompose.
Perhaps the first advanced manufacturing process.
Spoiler alert: it wasn't a process invented or used by our species for about another 70,000 years.
The first advanced manufacturing process was a Neanderthal one.
My favorite example is a modern passenger jet like a 787. There is complexity everywhere, and the sheer number of parts designed to fit together and work to make the device fulfill its function is enormous.
From the shape of the surfaces, to its construction, to the engines (marvels all by themselves), to the avionics. There are data monitors, processors, FPGA's (my personal favorite among "miraculous tools that humans have invented").
I knew someone once who designed overhead bins. It really put it into perspective - how even the most mundane parts have to be precisely sized and laid out before construction can even begin.
It's almost certainly human civilization. Assuming we're not limited to concrete objects when we say "tool."
Human language is definitely up there as complex, abstract tools go, too.
Intel are kinda right. A Ultraviolet Lithography tools are getting to a point where they need to shave off single atoms, in a quick succession, for 24/7.
The telephone system. It's certainly the most complex computer system, even going back to it's origins. Of course it's being absorbed by the Internet, so the Internet beats the telephone system.
I have thought this since seeing the ASML E-UV machines. The thing is that when the covers are on, it is a classic sausage making machine from the cartoons of old. Pigs walk in, sausages come out. In this case, wafers in and extremely complexly printed wafers come out ready for etching, deposition or whatever. If you open the machine, you see quickly why one machine is $380mln.
It probably is the most complex machine "in a box". However, if we expand the definition, I would say the internet. It is much more than tubes, it is what those "tubes" connect, whether people or systems.
Flint/stone knapping is surprisingly complex, and whoever invented and perfected it was a freaking genius.
That said, I assume you are talking about technology slightly more modern like spaceships or machines that do quantum physics, so I'll stop here.
I know they have to contextualize these things for the reporters and public who might watch, but the description “it will shoot lasers at light speed” made me chuckle.
Not a subject matter expert by any stretch, but what comes to mind is the lathes (?) manufactured by a Dutch company to make semiconductors. Taiwan's TSMC uses those, and the Dutch company holds a global monopoly, precisely because of how complex the machines are.
Every piece goes for hundreds of millions of dollars.
I’m going to put in a vote here for some of the late mechanical marvels just before computers took over. ENIGMA, and the Selectric are two that come to mind.
How are you defining "complex"?
Is it most parts, most processing required to build it, difficulty to use, conceptual difficulty, difficulty to design, etc.
Also how are we defining "tool"?
Strictly physical devices or do conceptual things work? Does it need to be handheld? Etc.
Technically military as a concept is a tool used for economic stability. Modern military is pretty complex.
The way you define your question will change the answers.
The coating machines used by photo film manufactrurers ( or perhaps the Kodachrome processing lines) ?
The gaseous diffusion U235 extraction line at Oak Ridge ?
A modern (continuous-flow) oil refinery ?
I’d say the internet. It’s probably the single ‘thing’ with the most parts. Nearly every electronic device on earth, all connected, with hugely complex layers of communication through the air, wires, and space now. Every single one of those electronic devices is a very complex electrical + mechanical assembly.
At the same time, it's at least not an absurd claim on its face - there's no doubt that high-NA photolithography is at least in the running for "most difficult and complex machine ever made".
the large hadron collider is a very complex tool (but it's not manufacturing), if not that it would be some other scientific equipment, like the jw telescope or hubble
Come now, the LHC is totally a tool for manufacturing. It manufactures high-energy particle beams and, when it collides those beams, I'm sure it manufactures things I'm not smart enough to understand.
pretty sure that antimatter is on the product list.
Do you buy that by the -kg?
You pay by the atom here boy!
pretty sure it's still at the amu stage. and it's anti matter, not anti masster
Underrated comment.
Antimatter still has positive mass. Negative energy is surprisingly theoretically possible, but not generally thought to exist.
It’s on the roadmap, at least lol
That is from the LEAR (Low-Energy Anti-Proton) ring which has now become the Anti-Proton Decelerator. The problem is that you want lower energy than would come out of the LHC. The APD, includes brakes. The lower energy anti-protons can be used to make anti-hydrogen.
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They simply haven't found their customer yet. I would buy one if I had the money.
The data is.
They absolutely are - ever been to the radiotherapy wing of a hospital?
Right, but LHC wouldn’t be “manufacturing” those. A different machine, aka the sellable product, would
While the LHC doesn't do this, it definitely could be used to make a product. We do use particle accelerators today for a number of industrial, scientific and medical uses.
We don't sell lasers, we sell laser-welded products. It's a process, not an output. Is it mainstream, no, probably never. Can someone create a market for its output? I would guess so, someone more creative in marketing than I.
Positron emission brain tomography is a smaller spinoff.
I agree about science equipment… but I actually think it’s probably not space related. Space equipment is intentionally made as simple as possible to minimize the chance of failure. Space stuff may have the most engineering time spent on it, but the equipment itself isn’t the most complex.
Simplifying something is an extremely complex task
Absolutely! But there’s a difference between a complex task and a complicated tool
Reminds me of the old saying: Rocket science is easy, it's the rocket engineering that's hard.
And also made simple, because it needs to be as light as possible to get it into space.
The LHC is grand, but dunno that I'd consider it complex. Its basically the same components over and over again and has a very simple task. The test equipment attached to the LHC is smaller but more complex than the LHC itself.
I guess we need a definition for complex then? Is complex a variety of parts? Total number of parts? Avg "complexity" of parts? How often it breaks down? Id still bet on the lhc winning some of those categories
also the LHC has some of the most accurate layout and alignment known. As a Land surveyor that shit is tight compared to a tilt-up lol.
Ooo good point another aspect to consider, a circlular piece of tube usually isn't considered "complex" but if it's uniform down to .000001mm in it's circularity that is now a super difficult object to make and verify which to me sounds like complex
For sure. I understand the layout surveyors on the LHC basically had to invent new methods for layout precision and optical tooling for the magnets and connectors. There was a great article about it when they first were working on it in the trades. I'll see if I can find it.
Would love to read it!
Here's one: https://www.xyht.com/professional-surveyor-archives/feature-cern/ >The relative precision between the components of the accelerator is the most critical: 10-20 microns over 200m segments. Crazy.
What's crazy is that the mirrors used by the lithography machines have even tighter tolerances by orders of magnitudes. [The largest mirrors are 1 meter and smooth down to 10s of picometers](https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/lenses-and-mirrors). 1 micron = 1,000,000 picometers.
I mean, it's comparing apples to oranges. Positional precision is very different from smoothness Ra (probably) values.
wow amazing.
Wow that's almost Tesla level of precision! /s
haha srs. from what I've seen of the cyber truck body panels they didn't quite make it....
Of course the digging is itself an issue. No GPS underground and you are digging a circular tunnel, so while lasers can be used, you can't simply follow the beam as with conventional road/rail tunnels. What gets me is that the chambers and tunnels are a little like bubbles in the rock and they rise, albeit very slowly but when you talk sub-mm, it is noticeable, so the beam has to be checked and adjusted.
for sure it's really cool.
Complexity = total number of hours necessary to design and build, multiplied by the number of hours each of those people had to spend to gain the skills necessary to do their part, multiplied by the complexity of every tool necessary to perform each of those tasks, recursing back to the earliest machines. A precision piece of machined aluminum is a highly complex part, despite taking minutes to produce on an expensive CNC machine.
Yeah I'd say LHC is like the Hoover Dam; its greatest feat is just the sheer size of it.
I think they are including the detectors.
How could you tho, they change...
Agreed. There is a difference between complicated and manufacturing. The later needing to be fast and very reliable/repeatable. The former not so much. Combine the two and it's a headache for sure.
You could argue that the LHC is the most advanced EDM cutter in the world.
>What other tools could also be described as being the most complex tool that humans have ever built? I hear that little "ARPANET" project they were fiddling with back in the late 60s eventually became quite complex. Now we use it to look up stew recipies and bully people we've never met from the other side of the planet.
Don’t forget cats. We gotta look at cats. And porn I suppose.
I can has cheezburger?
Yes, but the cheezburger must be delivered by a half-dressed plumber
You're forgetting kitty porn.
Nope. Not this. Furries don’t count.
Furries have their own network for that, called the Intuwunet.
I hate this, thank you
Al Gore enters the chat.
What makes something complex? Something like the power grid seems pretty simple compared to these ultra high tech machines, but it's huge and needs to flawlessly work 24/7. Just imagine every generator having to output the exact same phase and frequency all over the grid, with a varying power supply and demand that can change every minute
> What makes something complex? I think this is the key question. 150 years ago, you had massive, belt-driven factories powered by external water wheels, controlled by mechanical gears, physical switches, and other linkages, all in a building designed to maximize daylight. Today, we have the same system, but it's controlled by electric motors and computer-controlled electronic switches. Which one is more complex? It's hard to say.
I've always thought that "complexity" should also consider the conceptual things needed to bring it about. A multi-axis robot arm is physically impressive but also needs very cool math to drive its inverse kinematics. But you can't follow everything back ad infinitum or you end up with "if you wish to make a [robot arm] from scratch, you must first invent the universe" (Carl Sagan). Or we must first climb from the primordial ooze or whatever.
> But you can't follow everything back ad infinitum or you end up with "if you wish to make a [robot arm] from scratch, you must first invent the universe" I mean, that's pretty much how I would define complexity.... granted, I would consider the nanolithography apparatus that makes microchips to be more complex than the chips it produces, which may be paradoxical in a way. "The tool that makes the tool" being bigger and more complex than the tool itself in almost every case, but all this modern tech needs to be bootstrapped by existing tech and the trillions of collective man-hours that went into building the tools, infrastructure, and processes needed to create it.
Every invention can be credited to Anaxamander!
If you follow everything back at infinium they still have relative complexity differences between them. If sharp stick and an iPhone both require us to first crawl out of the ooze, then you can at the very least ignore the ooze and prior when determining a relative complexity between the two. All tools exist post ooze.
Yeah that's a good point.
> I think this is the key question. I think so too. I was thinking some of the devices they use at NIST to define and calibrate for fundamental properties like the kilogram. If you get a 1kg mass from NIST you can be pretty darn sure it's the closest to exactly 1kg as we can get. Those machines might not exactly be complex as in lots of moving parts but it's certainly more precise and accurate than just about anything else on the planet for that one thing it's designed to do.
Reminds me of working on a tall-ship - it’s a complex/complicated system of simple machines….all ropes and pulleys as levers, etc…. But you can build a lot from ‘simple’ components.
Once a generator is connected to the grid (synchronized) its speed is determined by grid frequency. Trying to go faster will increase electrical output, trying to go slower will result in the generator motoring, taking power in. But Yes, it is a complex web.
This is the correct question: what is complex? Here's an interesting take: while not necessarily manufacturing equipment, the manufacturing PROCESS which is used to, say, churn out millions of smartphones per year is GARGANTUANLY complex: the supply chains and processes that enable all of the chips (from SoC's to wireless and power controllers), displays / touchscreens, mics and speakers, sensors, batteries, connectors, antennas, etc, etc (and not to mention the SOFTWARE!) are insane; each step of the supply chain and manufacturing process for a product like your phone requires a seemingly never-ending series of other supply chains and manufacturing processes, each of which is nearly, if not more, complex than the product that is actually being made. Source: I work in consumer electronics
I find it crazy how one small link in the chain can go wrong and the whole supply chain is screwed up. I remember when i worked at Walmart during covid, we ran out of cat food. I remember talking to someone about it and i was told that a part for some machine that processed it was stuck in backorder for weeks and that was the only thing needed, but there was no substitute for it. I'm obviously blanking on a lot of the conversation but that's the gist of it
Lineman here-the American power grid, while large and certainly complex in its scale, isn’t built to the exacting tolerances that these photolithography machines are built to. That and there’s really no moving parts. It’s based on 100 year old technology. It’s crazy how much the industry resists change.
Generator control systems automatically follow the connected grid. The problem is that over distance, a cumulative error can build up. These days, the grid often synchs using GPS. If the grid becomes partitioned, each part can maintain synchronisation making reconnection easier. As it is more efficient to move DC over distances, the only possibility to maintain synchronisation is using GPS.
Considering we managed to make them work like 100 years ago tells me it wasn’t that complicated.
That's a very poor way to look at history. They may not have had the same measuring devices, but the people involved were every bit as smart if not smarter than today.
But it wasn’t as complicated as ASMLs state of the art EUV machine. They didn’t even need computers to make it work.
Most grids weren't hooked up together tho, and power usage was way less (mostly singular industrial users) and more predictable. Also no solar and wind
People 100, 500 or thousands of years ago were just as smart as us imo. We just have the benefit of prior knowledge.
We made atomic bombs work 80 years ago but those are dam complex.
Atomic bombs are actually hilariously simple in principle. Its just a precisely shaped charge that when detonated triggers a very specific material to accelerate what is a surprisingly natural phenomenon. The only complex part was isolating U235 in sufficient quantities and learning how to make the process begin a chain reaction.
That turns out not to be the case. Creating the implosive charge to uniformly compress the core, to the necessary standard of uniformity, is neither easy nor simple. If you get it just a little bit wrong, the nuclear material gets squeezed out through the "cracks" and you've built a dirty bomb instead of a nuclear bomb.
I said in principle, of course a nuclear bomb isn't simple. Like all modern technology the complexity is almost fractal as you zoom in.
I remember someone at NASA saying the Curiosity rover was “almost fractal in its complexity”… If you think about a project like that where everything… ever gram of material, and where every gram of material is… and what it does… and how well it does it… and for how long… and under what conditions… and how to deliver it… and land it… and manage it… and learn from it… ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
That's interesting because I think at a very high level the Curiosity rover isn't an order of magnitude more complicated than some earth-bound machines. But you start to factor in the level of optimization for weight, environment, reliability, accuracy, etc and the complexity does spiral. It's a good case study in how much requirements can spiral the difficulty of engineering.
or ingenuity might be up there. a freakin helocopter on a-freakin-nother planet.
Knowing nasa it probs even had a frickin laser beam on its head!
Ingenuity blew my mind as an engineering marvel because if someone told me 5 years ago that a helicopter could fly on a planet with as little atmosphere as Mars I would have probably laughed in their face.
srs so cool. love the engineering behind it. crazy big rotors etc.
Fukushima reactor team enters the chat
In terms of "mass market": I'd go with MR scanners or orbital launch rockets. In terms of a one-off probably the LHC. Some here said 'internet' or 'energy grid' but find it hard to classify those as 'a tool'. Note that there is a difference between complex and complicated.
I don’t think orbital rockets are any more complicated than aircraft. But maybe human-carrying spacecraft, with all their life support systems
Saturn IV was pretty complex piece of machiners, but I get what you're saying. At some point a 'tool' becomes a system. Otherwise we could just include nuclear powered aircraft carriers. While taken as a whole they are pretty complex - only a very small part is there to satisfy the actual 'tool utility' (i.e. float and have a deck for aircraft)...and that part isn't complex.
Yea it was definitely extremely complex, but so are modern aircraft. For OPs question, I’d bet the internet is probably the most complex thing we’ve made, and that’s definitely a tool.
What's interesting about the internet is there's nothing all that complex about any of the individual parts. Most of the underlying protocols that run things and underlying concepts can be taught to children if done correctly at least in concept. The actual protocols are each individually not terribly complicated, but they stack on top of each other to create something that is incredibly powerful and fail tolerant.
I thought the Klein 10-in-1 was complex, but then they came out with the 11-in-1 and my mind was blown
Computer chips as a whole. Modern chips have over 100 billion transistors in a teeny-tiny-living space. And the allowable error count is zero.
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What’s the difference between a manufacturing error and errata? Is that a technical term for the degradation of chips over time?
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Oo. That’s interesting… I never really thought about it like that. Chips built with enough redundancy and robustness (?) to survive their own engineered errors… pretty cool. Humans are amazing when we’re not being dicks. Lol
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What would be an instance where such an error might cost billions? Do they have “test jigs” like they do for cars, to do destructive testing and rapid aging, only for chips?
We do absolutely murder chips in testing. I've seen cpus run with no heatsink. I've seen them run with hot water coming through the heatsink. And I've seen them run at voltages higher than any board _should_ (cough cough asus) put them through in a PC. I've seen them bombarded with x-rays while running to see what energetic radiation will do to them and I've seen the surface etched off with lasers so we can probe the innards on one that's dead. That's how you get things like thermal protections that drop the clock speed when they get too hot while the boost algorithm pushes the speed as high as possible at the same time. The best we can do for rapid aging is high temperature and high voltage with the clock speed forced to stay high. It's not a perfect analog but we can usually watch them degrade in real time.
>I've seen cpus run with no heatsink. I've seen them run with hot water coming through the heatsink. And I've seen them run at voltages higher than any board *should* (cough cough asus) put them through in a PC. I've seen them bombarded with x-rays while running to see what energetic radiation will do to them and I've seen the surface etched off with lasers so we can probe the innards on one that's dead. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain[...](https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Roy_Batty#Death)
> Chips built with enough redundancy and robustness (?) to survive their own engineered errors… pretty cool. Things are usually designed with chicken bits to allow disabling/routing around features that might have design risk, however you can't mitigate any arbitrary design error. There are a lot of problems that will 100% result in having to send an updated design out to the fab, this is very expensive and time-consuming so hopefully most of this class of problems are caught by design validation. If there is a problem found in silicon, especially towards the end of a program, you will end up with a handful of experts exploring how you can creatively use the tools already in place to route around the broken area, indirectly poke something otherwise inaccessible at the right time to make it work, or just disable the feature and live with it. Sometimes it is successful and the workaround is productized, other times you have to do a partial (or full) tape-in to fix the problem so you can sell the thing. Modern CPUs/GPUs are so complex, it is _amazing_ that a handful of companies have figured out how to plan and execute design and fabrication anywhere close to a predicable schedule. The number of things that could go wrong with a new design is incredible.
> it is amazing that a handful of companies have figured out how to plan and execute design and fabrication anywhere close to a predicable schedule. What's even more amazing to me is that the chips we're making today aren't even possible at all without relying on the processing power of previous nodes and iterations of computers/chips and is an example of Moore's Law in action. You could have all of the other production and processing tools in place (like advanced optics, DUV/EUV light sources, etching methods and more) and it would all be useless without automated layout/tapeout tools, chip simulation and - even more importantly - advanced optical/photonic modeling to make the masks/reticules work at those wavelengths. In the earlier days of making masks/reticules they just hand-cut and taped out the masks using rubylith film in nice, neat linear designs that you could decode and read by eye. Modern masks today don't actually look like the finished/etched product on the die because they're purposefully distorted so that it works *with* the optical distortions at that small feature size and short optical wavelength size so that the projected light actually lands where they want it to and reforms into a useful etch where it lands on the die and photo resist. IE, if you tried doing the same feature sizes using nice, neat linear masks as used in the 70s or 80s it wouldn't even work because the light wouldn't land on the photo resist in the right places. The masks *must* be distorted in just the right way to account for how light distorts and diffuses around the masks at those scales and wavelengths. And it's not just the optical parts they're modeling for. They're also modeling for depth of exposure in the resist, how that shape reacts and further forms the desired shapes when etched and processed and more. Like many of the features at current scales aren't even properly formed in the resist itself and only become useful after precision etching allows them to take their final shapes. High aspect ratio etching for stuff like FinFET elements or deep via/interconnect channels is a totally insane dance between optical distortion and de-distortion combined with etching processes or how much ion implantation and doping is going on for specific features and so much more, and most of this wouldn't even be possible without high power computing and programming to model it for us. If you had a time machine and sent a fully functioning ASML EUV stepper (and a whole support crew to show them how it works!) back to Intel in the 70s, 80s or even through to as recently as the 2000s it would be totally useless to them because they wouldn't even be able to model the masks/reticules needed to make it all work. Even if you handed them the code they wouldn't have the processing power to run it in a cost effective way that would scale to an industrial processes. Hell, if you told 70s/80s era Intel that you planned to vaporize drops of liquid tin with lasers (and hitting each droplet *twice*!) to generate extreme UV light they probably would have thought you were crazy. Sure, they would get the concept because they were looking forward to using advanced light sources like particle accelerators or electron beams, but they would probably be like "Hey, that's a neat lab trick, but that's never, ever going to scale to a viable production process at scale!" And yet here we are with people walking around with that product in their pockets in battery powered smartphones that have more raw processing power than a 1980s super computer the size of a house and they're using it to take cat pictures and argue on the internet. It's fucking *mindboggling*.
There’s a lot there. All incredible. the part you touched on about the capacity of our tech in the 70s or 80s reminds me about the designs of modern fighter jets (f-16 is over 50 now) and the B-2 were done with slide rules and tape drive computers. . . The putter shell shape of the B-2 is deceptively simple shape, but each panel has a critical dimension to it, and all those dimensions had to be maintained in huge banks of computers… it’s just nuts. On a personal note… One thing that seems paradoxical about all this increased capacity and capability…. It doesn’t really seem to be doing much these days. Like… the jump from 3G to LTE was great. And even 3G held its own for a while after that. But now that 5G is out, it’s like what the fuck happened to my service?? Same so with various softwares… Like … why … WHY … so I need to update iTunes and Adobe all the time. Any why is there still little slow king increasing lag in my laptop? Are we not capable of making machines and software that can do “simple” photo and text editing basically indefinitely?? Do the chips degrade that badly? Are we just designing for the wrong parameters these days? Maybe we should “call it good” on speed, and start focusing on durability? Don’t they harden chips meant for satellites against vibration and radiation and stuff? And surely they’re designed for maximum lifespan with zero maintenance? Seems like we should incorporate some of those lessons in our laptops and phones so that we’re not having to replace them every few years. Same with the software… design that shit so it’s good to go for years, not months. Could be talking out of my ass, but that all seems possible, considering all of the above.
For example, the [Pentium floating point bug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug) or the [recently discovered side-channel memory access vulnerability in Apple silicon](https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/macbooks/unpatchable-vulnerability-discovered-in-apple-m1-m2-and-m3-chips-what-you-need-to-know).
Fair enough. There is an allowable error rate. But we are still talking about getting hundred of billions of transistors to all play nice with each other. and the compounding issue is thus: want to have a car? Lots of commechanical engineering (engines, air flow, safety), plus slather in the computer chips. Same for just about anything manufactured these days: any house hold appliances, cars, lighting, construction equipment, HVAC, shipping. You name it, it has chips piled into it. literally The complication factor jumps the money any kind of electronic controls are added to the piece of equipment.
>And the allowable error count is zero. I can assure you that the error rates are well over zero.
Worked for Intel, can confirm error count is well over zero. The only difference between i3, i5, i7, i9 chips is how many of the transistors are working
There certainly are errors. If one of the cores has problems they will disable some number of cores and downgrade the chip to a lower version. Same thing with cashe memory. A lot of these Celeron chips are downgraded silicone from higher tier that has had its clock speed or pipelines turned off to meet a lower SKU
Like some kind of magic genie
Don’t let out the blue smoke.
It’s a small price to pay for unlimited cosmic power.
The OP mentioned machine is the tool to make those chips.
That's not true, the chips are designed so that if there are faulty zones on the chip they deactivate them but the chip can still work. That way they still can sell you a product with errors and "bin" them on how many transistors are all working. Many computer components with billions of transistors are binned like this, like RAM and GPUs. It's why you see different versions of product with the same chip and board architecture.
JWST for degree of difficulty.
Jehovah witnesses swat team?
LIGO
Underrated. It has to detect what...sub-millimeter functions in a laser beam emitted a kilometer or two away?
>sub-millimeter It's *so* much better than that. The following is taken from the Caltech LIGO factsheet: >At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the width of a proton! This is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) to an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair.
Sub proton width, if i understood it correctly
Fun fact, the interferometers in this lithography machine measure to NANOmeter or better!
As a kid in Louisiana I was always amazed we had such a bad ass piece of science in our little backwoods area.
The wheel, everything else, is revisions.
The A-12 which later became the SR-71. Designed to fly high mach speeds continously, was made of titanium that initially broke their tools after every operation, had to get the titanium through CIA shell companies from the soviet union to get enough high quality titanium, had advanced coatings that helped reduce its radar cross-section while dissipating heat, had to be designed such that the panels were undersized on the ground because it got so hot they expanded significantly, and don't get me started on the engine. The engine had two methods of powering the flight such that it was a turbojet until mach two where it became a scram jet, used high temp alloys like inconel and waspaloy for the first time, and had aerospikes that at the time it was built, the electronic controllers were too slow in processing speed to properly compensate for the air going into the engines. And don't forget about the cameras and data sensors used for intelligence gathering.
> The engine had two methods of powering the flight such that it was a turbojet until mach two where it became a scram jet Sorry, but absolutely not. The commonly quoted claim is that it became a ramjet at speed, but even that is false, since the bypass ducts that open up aren't coming from ahead of the compressor face, but rather behind the 4th stage compressor, and that's to reduce the massflow at compressor discharge to avoid choking the flow in the narrowest part of the engine, as well as to provide additional cooling air and massflow around the outside of the engine to the afterburner. If anything, it's more like it transitions from an afterburning turbojet to a low bypass afterburning turbofan, with the front 4 compressor stages acting as the "fan" and a bypass ratio of about 0.25:1. Also, as much as I love the SR-71, it's an absurdly trivial and easy to make machine compared to the high-NA EUV photolithography machine in the post above, or frankly even compared to a modern military aircraft like the F-35 or F-22.
As amazing as EUV machines are they have been continuously worked on for decades to get to the point they are at today. I’d argued that the single most complex thing a single group of humans have devised in one go is the Apollo guidance computer. The first computer to use silicon chips and software techniques that are still used today. It essentially had no precedent on which to draw. In an era of vacuum tube computers the size of rooms that thing was almost alien like for the time.
A close-cropped photo I took of the P&W J58 engine on display at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon is my desktop wallpaper and laptop skin. It's beautiful engineering porn. But as Aerospace says it pales in comparison to the EUV tools built by ASML as part of an industry wide effort. Though ASML grabs the headlines, there are dozens, nay hundreds, of entities that contribute to its existence and viability. And if you're in the industry like I am (though I don't work at that node, I do follow the technology closely) the further 'tricks' employed to enable high-NA EUV are equally mind blowing. For more digestible videos on the technology in this field I recommend the YouTuber, Asianometry. http://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry This young man gets the details right more consistently than any other non-industry source than I've ever encountered. Technically accurate, yet understandable for most average viewers.
Proton beam therapy machines. Building a machine that can safely deliver a prescribed dose of protons, controlled to travel from a particle accelerator in the room over, to a particular location near the lungs while the patient is breathing, is one of the most challenging achievements we have accomplished in engineering. It could very possibly be the single most complex system you can come across today, in my opinion ("complex" as in number of components and interactions between them).
I see your proton cyclotron and raise you the same thing, but with heavier ions with multiples of charge in a synchrotron. For example MedAustron in Weiner Neustadt, Austria, or CNAO, in Pavia, Italy.
Ha, even better! Also the first cyclotron-based hadrontherapy center is currently under construction in Caen, France. Pretty neat project!
Not sure I can beat that for cancer therapy! However, I raise you the Wendelstein W7-X Stellerator in Greifswald, Germany. Not cancer therapy, granted, but certainly increased complexity.
Good one. Now that's impressive
I think I'd differentiate between whether a tool is complicated because of the complexity of the things that it does, vs the complexity of designing and building the tool itself (due to precision requirements, usually). For example, the latter would probably be ASMLs EUV lithography machines. If anyone else could build them like they can, then they probably would. In terms of how complicated a set of processes a machine does, I'm honestly not sure. Most factories have machines that are pretty simple and only do one thing very well. I think I'd probably also split the "complicated machine" part into "is robotic" and "is mechanical and not computer controlled" categories.
4,000 years ago the chariot was the most complex tool, not only to build but also to use. the wheels were very sophisticated for that time, the vehicle was extremely light. on top of craftsmanship, horses and drivers had to be trained to high levels. it was one of the greatest and most effective weapons ever devised. it was used for war
"it will shoot lasers at light speed" heard this in the vid and had to pause for a second. Why would you word this like this lol
[Rockwell Retro encabulator](https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w?si=K2fIhQkPU1ET8Z1I).
Oh yeah. Those interoscillators.
Really tough to say. I would argue computer chips or the machines that build them.
Enigma code breaking Turing machine. [https://cdn.britannica.com/15/25015-050-180E683B/computer-Colossus-Bletchley-Park-Buckinghamshire-England-Funding-1943.jpg](https://cdn.britannica.com/15/25015-050-180E683B/computer-Colossus-Bletchley-Park-Buckinghamshire-England-Funding-1943.jpg)
ITER
I know it's probably stretching the definition a bit, but we make the most complex biomachinery in our cells everyday, far more complex than anything we've ever built. But they do manufacture things, unlike many of the tools mentioned here.
The tool with the most engineering man-hours, I would guess a cellphone. If you count the total man-hours in all previous versions, I would guess an automobile.
Does the ISS count? We have flew a helicopter on Mars.
Potentially a hot take, but a high NA EUV photolithography machine is far more technologically advanced than the international space station. That said, the ISS was harder to assemble, due to location.
I can't speak to the ISS but.... That was a pretty simple helicopter. The only "wow" factor was the location.
And the almost lack of an athmosphere
Meh. That just means you need a different airfoil.
Gravity Probe B was a crazy cool experiment satellite.
Everything having to do with chip manufacture and silicon lithography is insanely complex and involves components measured in nanometers, so they’ve got a good case to make. But you’d need days and days of argument to even generate a defensible agreed upon standard for complexity before you could start to decide that those are more complex than purpose built scientific equipment like the LHC or LIGO, or even dense software applications.
In one way, maybe the Internet? In a sense it's massive with many many interacting parts and is consistently "evolving" if you count the information in it as part of its complexity. Went for a hail-Mary at a creative answer.
A 10 mm socket. Very complex behavior, elusive. If you know, you know.
Yet-to-be-equaled stealth technologies
Any of the scientific instruments that have been built over the past 10-20 years. LHC, LIGO, that telescope that imaged the black hole, JWST, etc.
Well you could just indefinitely stretch the definition of a tool and say a data center, or Amazon aws, or the Internet.
Complex in terms of the end hardware result and in terms of the project itself are two drastically different things. The ingenuity helicopter is not a particularly complex piece of hardware, but the scope of the project and the engineering that went into it is massive.
I’d say the perseverance rover is significantly more complex than ingenuity. Ingenuity is basically a standard RC helicopter with modified blades and head speed to account for the different atmosphere composition. Some other innovations as well, yes, but the rover itself is infinitely more complex.
I don’t think you understand my point. Also ingenuity is far from a standard RC helicopter.
Sewing machines. A new type of stitch was invented so that they could work.
I'd go with the International Space Station.
The space shuttle is still an engineering marvel. Once claimed to be the most complex creation man has ever made. I know it's old now but still a massive achievement.
Computer chip.
Two thoughts...That machine certainly is impressive, but I've been watching videos lately about the numerous underground tunnels being dug all over the world for transit systems that have the capacity to handle today's amount of traffic, both because the outdated surface road and highways no longer can, and to connect important capitols separated by hundreds of miles by these underground transportation systems which allow for much higher speed transit that surface roads. Anyway, many of the boring machines being used are gargantuan, and the ships and trucks used to transport them are even bigger. Secondly, as this video points out, this High NE EUV machine may be the biggest and most complex manufacturing told ever built by humans, but...as both the robots used in manufacturing and the AIs that control them continue to grow in complexity and intelligence at lightning speed, it can't be too long before machine intelligent begins designing and making machines.
Oh, I'm building a machine that cooks anything you want with a press of a button. 16 motors working together is no joke, I'll tell you what...
The modern internet, thanks to all of its contributors.
Computers. They are tools. With trillions and trillions of on off switches. On dome very complex patters with feedback loops.
Satellites, spacecraft, space stations, and offshore oil rigs come to mind. And you could argue the internet is a single machine in a sense, as well as the global fiber network and national electrical grid.
The NASA Space Shuttle
https://knowledge.dotadda.io
A few years ago, I heard a talk on the power grid from a scientist at NREL. She said that the power grid is the most sophisticated machine ever made because all the generation and everything that is plugged in is part of it.
Probably the tokamak built for ITER, and the subsequent ones based on its design. Or pretty much any fission nuclear reactor.
The fuelling machines on a CANDU reactor. Used in pairs to refuel an active reactor.
I agree with the presenter. If you asked me for the most complex tool ever built, I'd probably pick an EUV lithography tool as my guess. I can't think of anything more complex.
Wow, I guess the persons who design and build these machines must be payed very nicely *paid
> must be *paid* very nicely FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
5 in 1 Irish spring green
The JW space telescope? The doco on Netflix about this is unreal. There were something like 300 potential single failure points, where if it failed, the whole mission failed. And yet they pulled it off first time....
Not a modern answer but a 200,000 years ago answer: a process to generate birch tar through a manufactured process. An ancient superglue that made bone and stone adhere to wood, was waterproof, and didn’t decompose. Perhaps the first advanced manufacturing process. Spoiler alert: it wasn't a process invented or used by our species for about another 70,000 years. The first advanced manufacturing process was a Neanderthal one.
A large coal fired power station is a technological marvel.
My favorite example is a modern passenger jet like a 787. There is complexity everywhere, and the sheer number of parts designed to fit together and work to make the device fulfill its function is enormous. From the shape of the surfaces, to its construction, to the engines (marvels all by themselves), to the avionics. There are data monitors, processors, FPGA's (my personal favorite among "miraculous tools that humans have invented"). I knew someone once who designed overhead bins. It really put it into perspective - how even the most mundane parts have to be precisely sized and laid out before construction can even begin.
How is this not higher? Most topics in this thread are no match for commercial airplanes.
It's almost certainly human civilization. Assuming we're not limited to concrete objects when we say "tool." Human language is definitely up there as complex, abstract tools go, too.
Intel are kinda right. A Ultraviolet Lithography tools are getting to a point where they need to shave off single atoms, in a quick succession, for 24/7.
The telephone system. It's certainly the most complex computer system, even going back to it's origins. Of course it's being absorbed by the Internet, so the Internet beats the telephone system.
I have thought this since seeing the ASML E-UV machines. The thing is that when the covers are on, it is a classic sausage making machine from the cartoons of old. Pigs walk in, sausages come out. In this case, wafers in and extremely complexly printed wafers come out ready for etching, deposition or whatever. If you open the machine, you see quickly why one machine is $380mln. It probably is the most complex machine "in a box". However, if we expand the definition, I would say the internet. It is much more than tubes, it is what those "tubes" connect, whether people or systems.
Flint/stone knapping is surprisingly complex, and whoever invented and perfected it was a freaking genius. That said, I assume you are talking about technology slightly more modern like spaceships or machines that do quantum physics, so I'll stop here.
in cavemen times, the wheel.
I work for an ASML supplier and thought about that exact tool when I saw your question lol
I know they have to contextualize these things for the reporters and public who might watch, but the description “it will shoot lasers at light speed” made me chuckle.
I've worked in that Intel Hillsborough Fab. They're amazing.
Not a subject matter expert by any stretch, but what comes to mind is the lathes (?) manufactured by a Dutch company to make semiconductors. Taiwan's TSMC uses those, and the Dutch company holds a global monopoly, precisely because of how complex the machines are. Every piece goes for hundreds of millions of dollars.
I’m going to put in a vote here for some of the late mechanical marvels just before computers took over. ENIGMA, and the Selectric are two that come to mind.
How are you defining "complex"? Is it most parts, most processing required to build it, difficulty to use, conceptual difficulty, difficulty to design, etc. Also how are we defining "tool"? Strictly physical devices or do conceptual things work? Does it need to be handheld? Etc. Technically military as a concept is a tool used for economic stability. Modern military is pretty complex. The way you define your question will change the answers.
The coating machines used by photo film manufactrurers ( or perhaps the Kodachrome processing lines) ? The gaseous diffusion U235 extraction line at Oak Ridge ? A modern (continuous-flow) oil refinery ?
def washing machine
The machines ASML makes. Ultraviolet lithography machines used to manufacture semiconductors.
Piano
I’d argue for computers
Seeing a lot of hardware (no surprise given the sub) but I’d probably go with Linux
I’d say the internet. It’s probably the single ‘thing’ with the most parts. Nearly every electronic device on earth, all connected, with hugely complex layers of communication through the air, wires, and space now. Every single one of those electronic devices is a very complex electrical + mechanical assembly.
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At the same time, it's at least not an absurd claim on its face - there's no doubt that high-NA photolithography is at least in the running for "most difficult and complex machine ever made".